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Richard Brookes: Biteback

Good to see Harold Pinter doing Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court. He has an extraordinary presence on stage or screen.

Potential drama afterwards too, in the bar, where both Edward Beckett, the Irish playwright’s nephew and literary executor, and Peter Hall were. The Beckett estate can be very prickly about productions that veer from Sam’s stage directions, let alone unusual casting. But Edward Beckett told me he approved of this one, even if it left out the banana jokes, and had Pinter, for health reasons, in a wheelchair. Last year, the estate stopped Hall’s planned 50th- anniversary West End production of Waiting for Godot. Our greatest theatre director, who made his name as a youngster with Beckett’s play in 1955, was not amused. Instead, the Barbican went first with its staging, and only in the past fortnight has Hall’s Godot finally made it to the West End.